Digital Direct at Autodesk

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Jeff is a Silicon Valley veteran with 25 years of experience in sales, marketing & channels. 15 of those years have been in SaaS startups, prior to joining Ziff Davis to head up sales, channels & alliances for their B2BSignals division. Ad adviser to startups in his free time,Jeff also enjoys the game of chess and being outdoors.

How does a market leader in every category its products sell in continue to build competitive advantage? This is a conversation we had with our most recent guest, Siara Nazir, Head of Digital Marketing at Autodesk.

About Autodesk

Founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Rafael, CA, Autodesk (Nasdaq: ADSK) “makes software for people who make things” in key industries such as manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, media, and entertainment. Its revenue for FY 2017 was just over $2 billion.

Background and Career

Of all the thought leaders in our series, Siara was the youngest in age when she knew she wanted to go into marketing. She said she was about 11 years old when a lady came to her school and did a survey of the children saying: “I can tell you what career you should pursue.” Siara took the survey and the answer came back that her career should be “marketing.” She said she has never looked back since and has loved every day in her chosen career path.

We asked about mentors and she mentioned Lindsay Davidson who was Siara’s manager at CMP Media. She said Lindsay was instrumental in formulating her core thinking that she uses to this day. Siara also mentioned Lenny Alugas whom she reported to at Symantec.

A thought-provoking marketing book she recommends is Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe, which she said helps you understand how customer acquisition and retention are tightly interconnected with each other

Digital Direct

Prior to joining Autodesk, Siara built out the e-commerce program at Symantec. She said Symantec was migrating from Digital River to its own platform, and her role was to help in the build-out of the infrastructure. That experience prepared her well for her current role at Autodesk, which has a mandate from CEO Andrew Anagnost to pursue a Digital Direct strategy and is also transitioning from Digital River to its own infrastructure.

Siara said the Digital Direct initiative is one of the biggest endeavors the company has embarked on and is flipping the marketing approach to be more customer-centric. She said that whereas previously there was a focus on selling product features, with the digital approach the team can look at data analytically and see along many dimensions what customers are resonating with. Siara said that at Symantec she was scoring traffic and presenting pages and offers in real-time across over 150 variables, which resulted in a 23% increase in conversions. She is now implementing many of these processes at Autodesk.

Customer Profiling

Siara noted that the traditional marketing funnel has completely changed: “customers come in, jump out, come back in, touch a social channel etc.” She said good data and metrics become all the more critical with these non-linear and more complicated customer journeys. She is also working on a “Persona Project” to understand customer’s attitudes and beliefs towards various products – why do certain personas use the product? what are their beliefs? why do they stick with a particular product for 4 months instead of 1 year? She said one of the persona categories they pay attention to, and which is often overlooked, are those customers that don’t ever use the product.

We asked what criteria Siara uses to allocates resources for different lead generation efforts. She acknowledged that Autodesk is in a situation that most marketers would dream of: having market-leading products in their respective categories and therefore less of a need to spend on building brand awareness. The most critical focus is on continuing to keep customers renewing, while also enabling acquisitions with new marketing channels and new ways for customers to interact with Autodesk products.

Siara gave an interesting example in the media and entertainment industry with animation software that is used in many motion pictures. She said of all the incoming traffic, there is an approximate 50/50 split on whether they will be directed to a “buy” page or a “trial” page. The choice depends on the search terms used. If the search terms are of non-Autodesk brand (and therefore the visitor is non-brand loyal) the traffic will be sent to a “try” page. Those typing in specific Autodesk brand terms (and potentially brand loyal) would be sent to a “buy.”

Co-AuthorShastri Purushotma: Executive Producer - Ziff Davis B2B
Shastri is a partner at VaaS Advisors - a Value as a Service consulting company. He has written many articles for various Ziff Davis publications as well as the Huffington Post and Washington Post.